You are encouraged to discuss homework problems with your fellow students. However, each student must write up the homework or complete the corresponding web-based homework individually!

Homework will be assigned weekly; check here for specific weekly assignments. Note that the odd-numbered (paper) problems have answers at the back of the textbook. You should solve these problems without recourse to the answer key, and should write the problem up carefully in your own words even if you have consulted the book for the final answer. Always show your work!

You will also complete part of the homework problems via a web interface provided by the publisher of the textbook. One of the benefits of the web-based system is that it will provide immediate feedback about whether your answers are right and wrong.

Web-based homework problems are much like the usual ones: you need to give answers to a series of short questions, some of them multiple-choice, others not. The only difference is that instead of doing it on paper, you are doing it over the Internet. You can access the web interface from any computer which has Internet connection, whether from home, from one of the University SINC sites, or say, from an Internet cafe in Bombay, Moscow, or Rome. No special software is required: all you need is a relatively recent Web browser. Also, you can do the web-based homework whenever you want (of course, before the deadline). You can look at the problems, or even print some of them, then go home, think them over, and come back later with your answer. In fact, this is perhaps the recommended way of doing the web-based homework.

Each problem has many variants, and different students are given different variants. So do not try to compare your answers to that of your classmates.

The web-based assignments are set up such that you have 3 takes per assignment. If you submit an answer for a problem and get it wrong (either you see "wrong" on the screen, or the meter above the problem does not add its percentage value), you get another try. You have 3 tries per problem in each take; after the third incorrect answer you have no more tries for that take. For each take, you can do "unlimited retakes", which means you can work on the assignment for a while, then leave and come back later. For this you will need to click on the Save assignment for later button. Do NOT click on the Submit assignment for grading button before you are ready to submit your homework or you exhausted all your tries for some problems. In this case, you will have two more takes to go. There is NO way to edit your answers once you click on Submit assignment for grading for the third time.

Warning: If you do not click Save assignment for later before logging out or closing your browser window, the program may end the assignment for you due to (long) inactivity (say more than 10-15 minutes). Thus it is very important to click Save assignment for later if you wish to come back to the assignment at a later time.